14 minute read
Pioneering the park
‘Without Birkenhead Park, there would be no Central Park and without Central Park, there would be no New York City’. But how much of this legacy remains relevant for the designers of the climate resilient park for the 21st century?
In April 2023 the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that Birkenhead Park, ‘a pioneering project to bring greenery to urban environments’ providing ‘a blueprint for municipal planning that has influenced town and city parks across the world’, would be added to its Tentative List for consideration as a World Heritage site. Inclusion means the government will support Wirral Council in the development of a bid to UNESCO for the prestigious status. Currently the UK has 33 World Heritage Sites, none of which are publicly commissioned civic parks, making Birkenhead Park the first, should the application succeed.
Birkenhead Park, near Liverpool, is ‘pioneering’ because it was globally the first free-to-enter park commissioned by a municipality, paid for with public funds. It commenced an urban-park movement that had international impact, including on the design of Central Park in New York City, possibly the world’s most famous metropolitan park.
Of course, parks have been around for centuries, the earliest ones adapted from royal or private estates, or created through philanthropy, but they were not universally accessible. For example, in 1811 The Regent’s Park, London (Grade I listed) was designed by John Nash (1752–1835) under royal commission. However, initially it was accessible just to residents of villas built around the park and only in 1835 did a section open to the public. In 1840 Derby Arboretum (Grade II*) was opened, commissioned privately by benefactor Joseph Strutt and designed by influential Scottish author and designer JC Loudon (1783–1843), but was free to enter only on a limited basis. Victoria Park (Grade II*), London, was the most publicly accessible large park of the period. However, it was a Royal Park, having been commissioned by Queen Victoria, albeit following public petition, and paid for by Royal Grant. Designed initially by James Pennethorne (1801–71), of the Crown Estate, with early modifications by others, the 215-acre site opened to the public in 1845, transferring to municipal ownership in 1887.
For inclusion on the World Heritage List a site must be of ‘outstanding universal value’ and satisfy at least one of ten criteria. Birkenhead Park’s management team considers the site satisfies three of these: it represents ‘a masterpiece of human creative genius; it exhibits, ‘an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design’; and it is ‘an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history’. Birkenhead has rightly high hopes for its bid, but it has much to do to develop a successful nomination, a process that can take several years.
Given such developments, it seems timely to gain an historical perspective on the impact of two major mid-19-century parks that have broadly formed our perception of what an urban public park should be, at least until recent times. This article examines Birkenhead Park and Central Park, to consider common themes in terms of their commissioning, design and influence over the past 180 years
Birkenhead Park
From as early as 1822 Loudon had campaigned for the creation of universal public parks as metaphorical ‘breathing places’. This push grew from public-health concerns within the rapidly expanding urban areas, when disease was thought to have been spread by ‘miasmas’ – bad air emanating from decomposing organic waste and contaminated water. Although the mechanism of air pollution or its management were not then understood, there was a sense that green spaces could help. Additionally, parks could offer the city-dweller an antidote to an increasingly industrial lifestyle and concurrently improve moral behaviour by providing a distraction to public-house culture. They could also advance local land values, especially when aspirational villas were part of the layout design. The case for planned public parks was reinforced by the 1833 Select Committee on Public Walks, whose remit included consideration of ‘the best means of securing open spaces in the immediate vicinity of populous towns, as public walks calculated to promote the health and comfort of the inhabitants’.
Birkenhead, which sits at the north end of the Wirral Peninsula in northwest England, has 12-century monastic foundations. Water and transport were key to its development – initially the monks operated a ferry across the Mersey to Liverpool to deliver produce to market. It remained a small settlement until the early 19-century when, like elsewhere, steamboats replaced rowed vessels and the town expanded. In 1833, following the Select Committee, Birkenhead Improvement Commission was enacted to provide municipal services. Soon they received requests to provide a public park. This was made possible through the 1843 Birkenhead Extension Act of Parliament, which permitted the town to use public money to create a civic park.
The commissioners promptly borrowed £60,000 from the government and purchased poor quality, low-lying marshy land on the town’s edge. An area of 125 acres was allocated for the park and a further 60, around the periphery, sold for private houses to bolster funds. Keen to maintain control of the overall aesthetic, the Commission mandated adherence to their own housing style guide.
Joseph Paxton (1803–65), eminent horticulturist, author and head gardener at Chatsworth Estate, whose recent work at Prince’s Park, Liverpool (1842–44) for philanthropic industrialist Richard Vaughan Yates had been admired, was appointed directly by the Commission to design Birkenhead Park. Paxton laid the site out between 1843 and 1847 for a fee of £800. His design concept was to bring a piece of countryside into the urban setting. A combination of open meadows, naturalistic woodland, tree clumps, rocky gorges and two sinuous ribbon lakes with islands were created, all of which afforded a comfortable combination of wide views and intimate spaces. Paxton drained the site and used excavated lake spoil to create topography, in places raising it ten metres, on an otherwise flat site. The resultant landform concealed the town and heightened the sense of rus in urbe. The work was supervised by Edward Kemp (1817–1891), a protégé from Chatsworth, who later established himself as a successful landscape designer and author.
Traffic segregation was an innovative element – the park was connected to the town east–west by Ashville Road, while a peripheral carriage route circumnavigated the site, beyond which were the villas set in private gardens. The only part of Paxton’s design to accommodate flower gardens was the transitional zone between villas and park.
Perambulation was until this time the traditional activity undertaken in parks, and so a series of winding footpaths moved people through the site. However, in yet another innovation he extended the scope of activity by creating large areas of grassland for sports, principally cricket and archery. Architectural elements were expected by the client and Paxton employed Liverpool architect Lewis Hornblower (1823–1879) – who also co-designed Sefton Park – to design structures including a tripled-arched grand entrance (which Paxton considered too conspicuous, but was nonetheless approved by the town), lodges, bridges, boathouse and an ornate Swiss bridge.
Birkenhead Park was completed in autumn 1846 at an estimated cost of £227,000. It was a milestone in the British urban-park movement and was enthusiastically received when it opened in spring 1847. Today, most of Paxton’s original design still exists and the now Grade I listed park receives around two million visitors a year, which undoubtedly will increase substantially should it receive World Heritage status.
Central Park
In 1850 Fredrick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), an American gentleman farmer, spent six months travelling Europe to study agricultural systems. He was in England during May and was charmed by the beauty of the neat countryside, including that of his ancestral home, Olmsted Hall, Cambridgeshire. He went to see the layout of Birkenhead new-town, where by chance a shopkeeper urged him to visit the town’s new park. It was a serendipitous suggestion that changed the course of Olmsted’s life, and that of the urban-park movement.
While critical of the ostentatious grand entrance and elaborate flower beds, Olmsted was enthralled by everything else and ‘the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty’.
He admired the rich planting of trees and shrubs and the sheep-grazed meadows, the topography, the successful drainage system, segregated traffic routes and the cricket. But what struck him most was that the park was ‘enjoyed... equally by all classes’ and he dubbed it ‘The People’s Garden’. Olmsted published his findings in several papers and became a champion for universal public parks.
Meanwhile, New York City was rapidly expanding and overcrowded, yet its 1811 grid layout provided no large park. There was a danger that all land could be built upon before one was created. By 1853 the city, under pressure from advocates, started to acquire land for one. They already owned two large Midtown reservoirs (constructed in the wake of an 1832 cholera epidemic), and for economic expediency, and following a suggestion by influential landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–52), they decided to build the park around the reservoirs. This was legally enacted by the Central Park Act 1853. Commissioners were appointed to raise funds and acquire the remaining land. The creation of the park was considered part of the city’s critical public-health infrastructure as ‘lungs of the city’. The 843-acre site on Manhattan Island was mostly rocky and swampy. But it wasn’t totally inhospitable – a community of home-owning African-Americans and immigrants lived in an area called Seneca Village, where they had established small gardens and woods. In an act of social cleansing, they were relocated to facilitate the park’s construction.
In 1857, Olmstead, by then a successful reporter on matters of agriculture and social reform, was appointed Central Park Superintendent to oversee its development. A year later the commissioners held a design competition. Paxton’s apprentice Kemp was purportedly a judge. Thirty-three entries were received including ‘The Greensward Plan of Central Park’ from Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (1824–95). Vaux, a British architect, had moved from England to NYC in 1850 to work for Andrew Jackson Downing, soon becoming partner. Downing’s accidental death in 1852 left Vaux running the practice and, in tribute to his former colleague who had the original vision for Central Park, and probably his own advancement, invited Olmsted to partner in a submission. They produced 12 illustrated boards, printed text, construction details and cost estimates. Despite Olmsted not having previously designed, let alone built, a landscape, they won and received the $2,000 prize. It was an enormous commission for a complex site. Construction occurred in two phases, 1858–63 and 1865–78, and cost $14 million.
The ‘Greensward’ concept offered city-dwellers an experience of countryside and nature, as Vaux said: ‘Nature first and second and third –architecture after a while’.⁹ OlmstedVaux’s design pivoted around the centrally placed reservoirs. They anticipated that the city would grow enormously around the park and responded with a novel traffic management system: four sunken transverse roads for non-park users, screened to the sides by planting, with green bridges above for park users; serpentine carriage drives within the park as well as a complex undulating footpath and bridleway network, all offering scenic views. A thick boundary of trees framed the park within which sinuous lakes, meadows, woodlands, sports areas and playgrounds were carved, offering a variety of spaces – the curvaceous forms of which provided urbanites with contrast to the unrelenting rectilinear city grid. Timber structures, such as summerhouses and pergolas, enhanced the rustic ambiance. As at Birkenhead, the designers eschewed formality; however, the commissioners’ civic pride required some – and so an asymmetrically placed tree-lined Mall led to the Bethesda Terrace with fountain and arcade. Elsewhere ornamental arches and bridges abounded, plus some ornamental buildings.
Olmstead acknowledged the importance of Central Park ‘as the first real park made in this country – a democratic development of the highest significance … the primary purpose is to provide the best practical means of healthful recreation for the inhabitants of all classes’. The Olmsted-Vaux design is mostly intact and the park, now a designated National Historic Landscape, is on the US government’s Tentative List for World Heritage status. Managed by the Central Park Conservancy on behalf of the city since 1980, the site continues to undergo restoration and adaptation to accommodate its annual 42 million visitors. Acknowledging the important link between Birkenhead and Central Park, Doug Blonsky, former president and CEO of the Conservancy, commented in 2013 that ‘without Birkenhead Park, there would be no Central Park and without Central Park, there would be no New York City’. Quite a thought.
The relevance of large public parks
Having developed from a desire to improve public health, by the close of the 19-century the need for free public parks was considered an urban-form necessity, with Birkenhead and Central Park the launchpads of their respective national city-parks movements. Local and national political leadership and ambition was crucial to their creation, and artistic and technical vision by the designers was essential to their execution and enduring success. The projects redirected Paxton’s and Olmsted’s own careers in the nascent profession of landscape architecture and established our practice as one founded on open-space planning.
But do large parks like these tie us to a public park concept that is no longer relevant to current needs? I don’t believe it does – yes, we now expect more social engagement in their development, but they continue to contribute to city life – not just to health and wellbeing, so ably demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic, where they diluted crowds so that smaller parks were not overwhelmed, but also for their utility in contributing to green infrastructure and its essential role in combating climate change – stormwater and air pollution management, biodiversity, air cooling, etc. The relative informality and simplicity of planting, predominantly trees and meadows, continues to be a touchstone with nature and appeals to the contemporary user, while simultaneously assisting diminishing park maintenance budgets, being less onerous than more fussy planting. The concept of segregated traffic is as relevant now as it was in the past, despite vehicles changing. Popular sports might differ but grass pitches are still required. Large parks modelled on these heritage sites complement smaller city spaces and should be viewed as part of a linked greenway system and, given the rise in green ‘social prescriptions’, be considered complementary to, and as essential as, the National Health Service.
Karen Fitzsimon is a chartered landscape architect, historian and horticulturist. She researches, writes and lectures about British landscape architecture, is a visiting lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and is also an experienced urban food-grower.
